These 20 jobs have the biggest gender pay gaps

When, during her acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Patricia Arquette said, “It’s our [women’s] time to have wage equality, once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” the crowd went wild. Then the controversy kicked in, as people dissected her language for nuance, the way they might parse the State of the Union.

But, here are some facts: The median earnings of women still trail those of men, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, women earn 82.1% of what men do, and the pay gap widens as women get older and enter the child-bearing years. While young women aged 16 to 24 earn 92% of men that age, women aged 25 to 54 earn just 81% of their male counterparts.

Women’s wages, however, have shown some improvement. At every level of education, the boost to women’s weekly earnings has significantly outpaced those of men.

And overall, the gender pay gap has been narrowing. In 1979, women made less than 65 percent of what men did, but as you can see from this graph, women are catching up, albeit slowly.

Still, there remains a significant gender pay gap, and some fields have bigger gaps than others. Fortune examined data from the BLS Current Population Survey and compared median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by occupation and gender, excluding occupations that lacked gender-specific data, and sorted to find the specific job types in which the gender pay gap was largest.

These are the 20 with the biggest gaps. Interestingly, half of them are white-collar jobs, including the one with the biggest pay gap.

What’s the cause? Countless studies have been devoted to parsing the data. A variety of explanations have been posited, ranging from the choices that women make — to work fewer hours, choose lower-paying professions — to women’s negotiating skills to employers’ tendency to “disproportionately reward” long hours in offices, which tends to penalize women with care-giving responsibilities.

While the debate is likely to rage on, it’s clear that gender-based pay gaps exist in most occupations. Here are the 20 jobs that have the biggest gender wage gaps.

Private equity’s gender gap isn’t going to change

Private equity is a giant boy’s club, and it isn’t under any pressure from its investors to change.

Only 11.8% of senior North American private equity executives are female, according to Preqin, and the figure is even lower if you eliminate non-investing administrative roles like chief financial officer and head of investor relations.

At Bain Capital, for example, only one of its 23 U.S.-based managing directors is a women (and just four of its 46 global managing directors). It’s even worse at The Blackstone Group BX, where just three of its 50 global managing directors for private equity are women (none of whom are senior managing directors). Or how about Gores Group, where the gender ratio is just 1/24, with that singular exception serving as CFO? And then there is Thoma Bravo, which earlier this year raised $3.65 billion for a new fund that doesn’t include a single female partner.

None of this seems to bother the folks who direct money into funds managed by these firms, according to a recent survey by Coller Capital (first spotted by peHUB). Of the 114 responding limited partners (most of whom were men), only 12% felt that a higher proportion of women in senior positions would help improve investment returns.

Okay, everyone is entitled to their opinions. But not necessarily when it is directly contradicted by their answer to a subsequent question about whether or not private equity firms “benefit generally from more gender-diverse teams.” This time, 59% of those same LPs responded affirmatively. Within that majority, 73% said that greater gender diversity is beneficial to “team quality,” 68% said it helps “team dynamics” and around 39% said it would improve risk management.

Put another way: Only 12% of LPs believe that having more women in senior private equity positions would improve returns, but 23% believe they would help with risk management (which, I’m pretty sure, is about helping to protect returns). Cognitive dissonance much?

What’s particularly galling about this is that LPs talk constantly about how they invest in “people” and “teams” — as opposed to specific investment strategies. If that’s the case, then wouldn’t you want to support something that you believe would improve “team quality” and “team dynamics?”

As we’ve seen since the financial crisis, private equity firms will change to meet the demands of their limited partners. Examples include fee alterations and the virtual disappearance of large “club” deals. When it comes to gender diversity, however, there are no such demands. Not because LPs don’t believe having more women in senior positions would help, but because they can’t bring themselves to make the mental connection.

Labor study: Gender wage gap affects top-earning women most

It’s no secret that women make less than men on average. But it also seems that the gender pay gap affects the highest-earning women more than most.

A recent global wage study from the International Labour Organization, an agency within the United Nations, found that women at the top of the wage scale in 38 countries surveyed in 2010 had the greatest disparity in pay compared with their male counterparts. In Europe, for example, the top 10% of female earners made nearly 700 euros ($868) less per month than the top 10% of men. The bottom 10% of female earners also made less than the bottom 10% of men, but the difference was only 100 euros ($124) per month.

The ILO says the actual, overall gender pay gap varies from a difference of around 4% to 36% in all of the countries surveyed, which include the United States. In the U.S., the gap between men and women in the top 10% of high-earners in their respective genders is about $3,500 per month, according to the ILO. That’s compared to a difference of roughly $500 for the bottom 10%.

The study also took into consideration such factors as education, work experience, seniority, location and the number of hours an employee works. ILO found that women had a better combination of those factors in almost half of the surveyed countries, though the gap in wages does not reflect that fact.

In many countries, motherhood is a major factor in the wage gap, the study found. In Mexico, for example, mothers earn 33% less than non-mothers, while the motherhood wage gap is at least 20% in countries such as Brazil, Peru and Uruguay. In Russia, mothers earn only 2% less than non-mothers.

For women, having more power at work can worsen depression

Having so-called job authority—the power to hire, fire, and pay people—and the socioeconomic advantage it confers, are typically considered assets in an employee’s life with few, if any exceptions. (There was never any wonder why Sheryl Sandberg was so adamant in urging women to seek it.) But a new study in the December issue of the American Sociological Association’s Journal of Health and Social Behavior tosses that notion aside when it comes to mental health.

Co-authors Tetyana Pudrovska, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amelia Karraker, a professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University, examined the effects of job authority on mental health through the prism of gender relations. They found that women with job authority exhibit more depressive symptoms than women without job authority. The opposite was true for men: those with authority are overall less depressed than men without work-related authority.

The study takes into account that, in general, women typically suffer from depression more often than men: When men and women without job authority are compared, women have slightly elevated depressive symptoms. When comparing men and women with job authority, however, women with such power show significantly more signs of depression, Pudrovska says.

“What’s most striking here is the traditional theory in medical sociology is that the socioeconomic advantage [from job authority] is good for health; it gives you more money, it means you probably have better education, and physically and mentally your health is better. [People with work-related authority] are socially advantaged in terms of these desirable characteristics,” she says.

So, why do women in higher-up positions often feel so down?

The study blames “interpersonal stressors” that women experience due to the “process of gender stratification.” The stressors that women face stem from “prejudice, discrimination, unfavorable stereotypes, negative social interactions, lack of communication and support from superiors and coworkers, and pressure to perform better than men to prove competence,” the study says.

Pudrovska points specifically to “the problem of legitimacy” that women confront in the workplace. They “face resistance, since their power is not consistent with what we think the norms are.” Women in power are also caught in what Pudrovska calls a “double bind.” They are expected to express both femininity and assertiveness. If they fail to balance those two qualities, they’re criticized for either being too docile and incompetent or too bossy.

Meanwhile, men benefit from job authority since their power is considered legitimate and natural. “They don’t have to overcome as much resistance and stereotypes,” Pudrovska says.

The study looked at data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which followed men and women from age 18 in 1957 to age 65 in 2004. “The female subjects of the study were part of the first generation of women who were well represented in the workforce,” Pudrovska says. The stresses this group felt are just as present—and perhaps more acute—for younger women.

“Now we’re bombarded with not being confident enough, not leaning in enough,” Pudrovska says. “Leaning in is a good thing in and of itself, but once you do so, the assumption is that everything should fall into place.”

But it’s hardly ever so simple. “Catching up with men in terms of structural aspects of workplace authority is not sufficient because the cultural meaning of exercising job authority is different for men and women,” the study says.

Women in tech earn less than men: Here’s one reason why

Women in the technology industry earn significantly less than men, according to a new study, partly because they ask for lower salaries.

The average minimum pay for female tech workers is $107,000, 13% less than the $124,000 that men earn, according to the recruiting start-up Hired.com.

A lot of factors may explain the gender gap. But one that gets less attention is what happens during salary negotiations.

Women in tech ask for salaries that are lower than their male counterparts: $114,000 versus $124,000, the report said. The study chalks up the discrepancy in salary requests to female workers “undervaluing” themselves or interpreting the question of salary in different ways.

Courtesy of Hired.com

Hired.com, which vets job candidates for 600-plus clients including Facebook FB, Twitter TWTR and OpenTable OPEN, based its findings on nearly 10,000 job candidates with different experience levels who applied for jobs in the last six months.

When considering all industries, women earn 22% less than equally qualified men, according to the American Association of University Women. Hired.com’s data suggests that the gap between men and women in tech — 13% — is smaller than other sectors, but that it nonetheless exists.
The average salaries of men and women tech workers. Courtesy of Hired.com

These latest findings come just days after Amazon AMZN disclosed data indicating its workforce heavily skews male. It also following a couple of weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella advised attendees at a women’s conference not to ask for raises because it’s not “good karma.” (He later apologized for the remark.) At least 14 other tech companies including Google GOOG, Facebook and Apple AAPL published their employee demographic data this year following criticism for their hiring practices, with LinkedIn proving the most diverse of the bunch.

Of course, other factors may also help explain why women earn less than men in tech including discrimination and women having more gaps in their resumes because of taking time off to raise families. But add what happens during salary negotiations to the list.

This woman is waging a quiet war on tech’s gender gap

Reshma Saujani is a former hedge fund lawyer, New York City deputy public advocate and the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress (she lost a primary race in 2010). In the spring of 2012, she shifted gears and launched Girls Who Code, a non-profit that aims to close the gender gap in technology and engineering.

In a relatively short amount of time, Saujani has gotten the likes of Twitter TWTR, General Electric GE, Square and Google GOOG to sign on to her initiative: two-month long programs that teach young women to code and offers mentorships. The companies host the girls at their headquarters; Square and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been a big supporter.

Saujani also been outspoken about the so-called “brogrammer” culture that has spread in Silicon Valley companies and why getting more girls to code isn’t a moral issue, but rather an economic necessity. (Hint: There is a growing talent shortage in technology.) We recently caught up with Saujani to find out more about her take on the challenges and opportunities in closing the gender gap.

Edited excerpts:

Fortune: How do girls get turned off of computer science?

Reshma Saujani: I don’t know if we ever turned them on to it. There has been a long line of women way back when involved in the history of programming. But when we started turning it from having computers that were procured by the military and academia to something very personalized, we immediately started marketing them towards boys, not girls. When you look at Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, many of them had these devices that they were tinkering with. Girls were not really part of that whole tinkering revolution.

Why is that?

Putting things together is considered to be a very male thing. Boys like to break things and put them back together. Girls like to dress up. In the 80s you had Revenge of the Nerds, and now we have the ‘brogrammer’ culture. We created a cultural myth around this, that you have to be that way to be successful. And in many ways that cultural myth is not attractive to women.

So what needs to happen to change this perception, that coding is for boys?

The Maker Faire movement is really important. It says that it’s not just boys that like to break things apart – it’s fun. What happens to boys in tech is in many ways different than what happens to girls in tech. it’s not that they’re facing sexism per se it’s that they don’t think it’s cool. So I think we really have to change the way we present technology.

But how do we do that? With pink Legos?

You have to meet girls where they are. One of our girls built a video game called Tampon Run. We can draw attention to menstruation and all sorts of issues. And listen, if pink Legos will encourage them to build, that’s fine. There isn’t an aptitude issue. I don’t think it’s that, genetically, girls and boys are wired differently. I think that’s absolutely false. To me it’s not about gender parity for the sake of gender parity. But there are problems that girls want to solve, and they’re very different. They’re often about world hunger, or obesity or other issues.

What’s Silicon Valley’s role in all of this?

Their role is to solve the pipeline problem. It’s great that you’re hosting girls who code but are you going to hire our girls? Are we really going to see a change happening in the next two years?

Microsoft’s CEO recently told a roomful of women that asking for a raise isn’t the best way to get ahead. What do you think we should be telling girls?

For so long women have been waiting to get recognized. The world doesn’t work that way. We need to teach girls that it’s ok to ask for what you want when it comes to your salary or whatever it is you want to enhance your career. No one is going to notice you no matter how amazing you are. After I lost my last race, nobody called to offer me a job. My phone isn’t ringing off the hook to join corporate boards. I have to ask. It just doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. If I waited until someone asked me to do anything I’d be waiting forever.

“From the MPW Co-chairs” is a series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

Why the U.S. is losing the global fight for gender equality

The gap in economic opportunity between American men and women is narrowing, but the U.S. still can’t seem to get ahead in the global race for equality.

The United States came in at No. 20 out of 142 countries in this year’s ranking of gender equality by the World Economic Forum. It marks a comeback of sorts for the country after having slipped out of the top 20 for the past two years.

The Global Gender Gap Index, released Monday night, measures gender-based disparities in individual countries over time. The organization ranks countries based on the progress they’ve made to close the gender gap in four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.

The highest possible score on the index is 1 and means that a country has fully eradicated the gender gap in every measured category. No country has actually done so since the index was first published in 2006.

Iceland, which has had a female head of state in 20 of the past 50 years, ranked No. 1 on WEF’s index with a score of .859. The country was closely followed by its Nordic neighbors: Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The U.S. finished with a score of .746, putting it behind countries like Canada, South Africa and France, but ahead of other developed countries like the United Kingdom and Australia.

A surprising finding is that the U.S. ranks lower than some countries with considerably less economic development. Rwanda and Nicaragua both have less than $9 billion in GDP, but both rank among the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to gender equality. The index measures gender disparities in access to resources and opportunities, regardless of overall resource availability and level of economic development.

“Both rich countries and poor countries can afford gender equality,” World Economic Forum Senior Director Saadia Zahidi said in an interview with Fortune. “Gender equality doesn’t have to only come along once a country is fully developed.”

Among the four equality categories WEF uses to rank countries, the U.S. ranked lowest in health and survival. While women outlive men by an average of about six years in OECD countries, American women outlive their male counterparts by just about three years, which hurt its ranking, said Zahidi.

The U.S. was also penalized by the shortage of women in political power, ending up ranked No. 54 in the political category largely because it has never had a female president. At a cabinet level, the U.S. has seen a slight increase with women holding 32% of positions compared with 27% last year. In Sweden, a relative utopia for female political leaders, women make up 57% of all ministers.

America is making the most progress closing the gender gap in terms of economic participation and opportunity. Ranked No. 4 on WEF’s list behind Burundi, Norway and Malawi, the U.S. has closed nearly 83% of the gender gap in the workplace since WEF first conducted the study in 2006. For the first time, the U.S. exceeded gender parity for professional and technical workers, 55% of whom are now women. Yet it still has work to do on wage equality for similar work: In the sub-category of wage equality, the U.S. received the low score of .66.

At this rate, the global gender gap in the workplace is not expected to close until 2095. Efforts to narrow the gap are moving at a glacial pace because a lot of the benefits are just coming to light now, Zahidi said. More companies globally are acknowledging that businesses that include more women at the top tend to outperform those who don’t. Also, more women are graduating from college than men while buying power among women is growing as well. As public figures like Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton take on investing in women and girls and closing the gender gap as public platform, Zahidi added the rate of change should increase.

“The notion that gender equality is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing is a fairly new mindset that did not exist in the public consciousness even five years ago,” she said. “In the short-term, this kind of change is hard because it is millions and millions of individual changes that need to come together on a global level.”

The places to top the list this year out of the 142 countries analyzed? The unsurprising Nordic contingent of Iceland (1), Finland (2), Norway (3), Sweden (4) and Denmark (4), famous for their holistic approaches to citizens’ personal and professional lives.

The report measures gender-based disparities across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics. “No country in the world has fully closed the gender gap, but all five of the Nordic countries have closed more than 80% of it,” reads the report. The study, now in its ninth year of publication, focuses on “whether the gap between women and men in the chosen variables has declined, rather than whether women are ‘winning” the ‘battle of the sexes.'”

By focusing on gender equality progress, the study allows less wealthy countries to sometimes trump those with larger GDPs. This year, for instance, Nicaragua (6), Rwanda (7) and the Philippines (9) ranked higher than the United Kingdom (28). Nicaragua gained ground in the health and survival category, where it scored first. Rwanda received high marks in political empowerment. The Philippines had success in the educational attainment and health and survival categories.

The study didn’t always feature Iceland in the number one spot. In fact, the country started in the No. 4 spot eight years ago and has since climbed the rankings. At the time, Sweden reigned supreme, overall (while the U.S. placed 23rd).

As the graphic below shows, the ten countries below are excelling in some areas—and, despite their high ranking in this study, have some other areas that could use serious improvement. The WEF gathered the data through a series of indexes, including information from the International Labour Organization, the UNESCO Institute for Statistic and the World Health Organization.

The overall score for a country is calculated with “an un-weighed average of each subindex score,” according to the report.

“Some of the most compelling findings regarding the benefits of gender equality are emerging from companies,” according to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in the report’s preface. “For example, companies that include more women at the top levels of leadership tend to outperform those that don’t.”

“As this Report shows, good progress has been made over the last years on gender equality, and in some cases, in a relatively short time,” he added. “Yet we are far from achieving equality of opportunity or equality of outcomes.”

I never asked for a raise, and it paid off

And as much as the flap over Microsoft MSFT CEO Satya Nadella’s off-hand comment about women and pay (“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise.”) fascinates me, I’ve felt the need to tear my hair out.

Give the guy a break—because I think he may be right.

Women, in particular, may blast me for saying this, but hear me out. I’m entering the fourth decade of my career at Fortune, and for much of that time I was underpaid. It was the price loyalty: I started out as a 24-year-old newbie and stayed loyal, while hotshot job-hoppers with big-money demands got recruited to come over and scored bigger paychecks than mine. “You really should talk to the higher-ups,” a couple of close colleagues, including richly compensated guys, kindly said to me. I thanked them and ignored their advice.

Why? Because I respected that budgets were tight, and better for the long-term value of my company—and my own career—if we hired the best people…and it’ll all work out in the end.

That’s what I told myself. Actually, I cared little about money (ironic, working for Fortune), had enough to be happy (being unmarried without kids allows that), and secretly looked down on super-successful people who worked just for big bucks. (Lacking envy of Wall Street honchos, tech billionaires and other rich people is a distinct advantage for a business writer.)

I refused to care about money. And it drove my friends crazy.

Meanwhile, as a co-founder of Fortune Most Powerful Women in 1998, I started to notice that many female CEOs, including IBM’s IBM Ginni Rometty, questioned their readiness for promotions at some stage, shied from career risk, and viewed success horizontally—they sought broad influence—vs. vertically climbing the ladder. Years before Facebook FB COO Sheryl Sandberg turned into the Oprah of career advice-giving, I wrote about women navigating their careers more warily than men. And early this year, when I innocently asked General Motors GM CEO Mary Barra if she ever asked for a raise, and she said “No,” I felt fortified—the GM chief, my spiritual sister.

Not that I didn’t advocate for myself. I climbed the Fortune masthead, from reporter to writer to senior writer, while occasionally subverting the system. Once when I was offered a promotion from senior writer to editor at large (a cryptic title awarded to veteran writers), with no boost in pay and no new responsibilities; I turned it down. I told my boss that I thought the title was unnecessary.

Call me stupid. I wanted to be rewarded for bona fide contributions.

My big Lean In moment came two years ago when I went to my boss, then-Editor Andy Serwer, and told him that I wanted—seriously, I was dying to—take on broader work within Time Inc., Fortune’s parent company. I told Andy that I’d keep supporting Fortune and Most Powerful Women, but I needed to do more. He backed me. And when I met with the top brass at the company, they asked for a job description. I wrote it, and I never mentioned money.

I got what I asked for: a new position developing conferences and other live content not only for Fortune but other Time Inc. magazines as well. I also got what I didn’t ask for: an increase in pay that was bigger than I ever would have expected. A lot more. Had I asked for a specific amount, I’d be earning less than I am today.

I’m not sure what the lesson is, except not asking for a raise worked out well for me. Fortune Broadsheet writer Caroline Fairchild yesterday quoted Kellogg Professor Vicky Medvec, an expert on negotiating whom I’ve come to know well. “You never ask for more money,” Medvec advises. “You ask for more of a package. As you go into a negotiation, you always make it about what you’re achieving for the business. The compensation should be the caboose of the offer. It is just along for the ride.”

For me, my raise was a nice caboose. And the money came with a good ride.

“From the MPW Co-chairs” is a daily series where the editors who oversee the Fortune Most Powerful Women brand share their insights about women leaders.

Dell CMO: Customer data ‘the single most important asset that we have’

Just yesterday, the United Parcel Service UPS became the latest company to fall victim to a customer data breach. The hack only affected customers at 1% of its U.S. locations, but the company was relatively lucky—other companies have suffered far more serious breaches in recent months. A data hack earlier this year at Target TGT affected as many as 110 million customers.

Karen Quintos, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Dell, thinks CMOs play a key role in stopping data breaches now and in the future. In an interview with Fortune, Quintos discussed her career, the dearth of women working in tech, and how she views the role of the CMO changing. (The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

How do you view your role in driving Dell’s business?

The CMO role, especially at a company that has very strong focus on customers and the role of technology, is pretty interesting. While I don’t have a direct profit and loss [line of the business,] we do spend more than $1 billion in marketing at Dell. That cuts across all of our customer segments from consumer all the way to the largest businesses. The role that technology and marketing technology is playing to is incredibly exciting and now the CMO is leading a lot of those conversations here at Dell. It is pretty interesting time to be at the core of all that as it is changing and evolving from a marketing and technology perspective.

How does the CMO play into avoiding customer data breaches?

More CMOs should be taking a much more active role in protecting customer data because it is the single most important asset that we have. Frankly, our customers expect that of us. When I moved into the CMO role we made a conscious decision to invest in a lot of our internal marketing capabilities and processes to make sure we were doing just that. Frankly, every time you click on something that is sent to you as a customer, that is being generated by someone in marketing. Marketing is the organization that is at the forefront of all of this.

What’s your take on the media focusing on the dearth of women in key leadership roles in business?

I am really encouraged now more than ever. I feel like there is a renewed sense of the reality of the situation and a frustration that the numbers haven’t moved enough. There have been a number of corporations and institutions that are putting the dialogue back on the table. I frankly think that if it doesn’t change in the next five years then we need to be doing something materially different as a country and as a private sector. Now we are seeing a lot of women in really tough jobs. You look at role models like [former Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton, Christine Lagarde and Angela Merkel and a number of women who are leading large companies. Now is a really good time to continue to move the debate and the progress.

How can we get more women working in the technology field?

I don’t think there is a silver bullet. It is a multi-faceted problem. We need to change the dialogue for the next generation when it comes to technology. When I look at the numbers of women going into the STEM fields (As in “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics” —Ed.) and how they have not moved over the last couple of years, I think we need to get to children in middle school and high school to get them to understand that technology is a part of everything. We need schools to spend more time and energy with girls to show them where the opportunities exist. A job is technology is not always about computer science or engineering. It could be about being a marketer in a high-tech business. I think that is a key part of the dialogue and you need to make it more exciting for them for them to move into these more tech-focused roles.

What role do you see companies playing?

Companies play a key role. Women as they join companies, the companies need to embrace those things that are unique to women. Women are going to want to have children and companies need to create on and off type ramp opportunities for women throughout their careers. They need to create flexible work environments.

Within technology, I think there are certain parts of the country, Silicon Valley being one, that there is this stereotype that it’s a man’s world and women can’t really be successful there. There is a lot of opportunity in the venture capital and Silicon Valley area to break down a lot of that mind set. There are so many successful female entrepreneurs where having access to capital and networks and everything is a huge enabler for them to be successful.

I certainly would not have been an advocate of doing that. I don’t know what challenge they were trying to solve, but I think there were probably other ways to solve it. Either you need more face time or you bring people together more. We found at Dell that not everyone can work remotely 100% of the time. There are certain jobs and times during the year where it just requires you to be in the office interacting with the team. The next generation of employees are looking at these flexible programs when they are choosing who they want to work for and companies have to embrace these flexible working relationships.

Why do you think work-life balance is sometimes viewed as a women’s issue?

There is not enough discussion about men that are making similar [work-life balance] decisions as women. My husband was one of them. When I moved into the CMO role at Dell, he made a conscious decision. Our son was entering his high school years. He said one of us needed to be at home with the children and he made that decision. I hope the debate and dialogue will be less about women coming off the career path, and more about how do companies create programs that work for men and women alike. I think that the next generation of employees are going to be expecting it.

How do you talk to your own daughters about their futures?

As a mother of two daughters, I spend an inordinate amount of time getting them to believe that they can do anything that they want to do. If they choose at the end of the day to stay home and take care of their family, I am really okay with that. I want them to know that that is choice that they can make, it is not something they have to default back to because they didn’t have great mentors or opportunities.

To get Caroline Fairchild’s daily newsletter on the most powerful women in business, go to getbroadsheet.com.